


Under Pressure

by onnenlintu



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Emil being Emil, Established Relationship, Every Hotakainen Getting On Every Other Hotakainen's Nerves, Family Shenanigans, Gen, M/M, writing a world where Emil and Ensi actually interact is a trip
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-05
Updated: 2019-05-25
Packaged: 2019-10-22 21:32:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 12,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17670485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onnenlintu/pseuds/onnenlintu
Summary: Slice-of-life modern AU. Technically a spinoff of "Ride Baby", as it begins just after Emil, Tuuri and Lalli leave that story. Contains Tuuri and Lalli trying to work out what to do with their lives, Onni knowing too well how the rest of his life will go, and an Ensi who just doesn't get what Emil's deal is.Aiming to publish in "parts" of 4-5 chapters at a time.





	1. Part One: Onnellinen Perhe

**Barcelona, 2012**   
  


The air stayed warm, even as the hour reached 3, then 4 in the morning. Tuuri began to wish she'd drunk either much less or just a little more than she had. Leaning against the bar, she wondered if she still had enough money to stop that uncomfortable hint of sobriety returning and still pay for the metro home. Everyone had gone home but Emil, and now he'd gone and disappeared off somewhere too.   
  
Someone offered to buy her a drink, and Tuuri almost considered letting him do it until she smelled him. Leaning away from the man's breath, Tuuri felt an arm slide around her neck as someone hugged her, and almost had a heart attack in the moment before she recognised the voice of its owner.  
  
“ _Hey_ sweetie! Is this guy _bothering_ you? Hey, _man_ , do you have something to _say_ to my _girlfriend_ _?_ ”  
  
Tuuri did not know how anyone found Emil's act convincing, but it was apparently enough hassle to make her space invader peel off, leaving Emil still leaning on her back with the weight of someone almost wasted enough to fall asleep there. Tuuri twisted to yell over the music into his ear. “Where have you been hiding?” He smelled distinctly of sweat, fancy conditioner, and sticky-residue drinks mixers.  
  
“Was in the toilets!”  
  
“For _half an hour?_ ”  
  
“Yeah?”  
  
Tuuri decided to assume Emil had been fixing some dire emergency with his hair. “I feel like I'm sobering up. It sucks!”  
  
“Oh no!” Emil stood on his tiptoes to lean over Tuuri towards the barmaid. “Hey! Are you still doing the cheap shots?”  
  
Tuuri yelled what he'd said in Spanish too, not wanting to be mistaken for someone who'd only been here a week. Whatever language the barmaid meant to reply in, the word was the same: “No.”  
  
“I'll get us some anyway.” Emil started fishing around in his back pocket.  
  
“Oh, you don't need to!” Tuuri barely bothered to pretend that wasn't a platitude. Well, compared to Swedish drink prices it was always happy hour here anyway. She felt distinctly jollier once she'd downed a bit more vodka, and decided that since the night would be over soon, she might as well dance. It worked up enough of a sweat that when the club finally kicked them out, the breeze had something to catch on. With her water bottle freed from the cloakroom and most of its contents gratefully chugged down, she walked down the street with arms outspread, cooling her liquor-sweaty armpits with an audible sound of relief.  
  
“Emil! The metro is this way!”  
  
“Oh yeah!”  
  
The two of them wobbled their way onto one of the broad-aisled underground trains, joining another wave of people going from the clubs to the edges of town. Tuuri leaned against the wall and thought of the chip van she knew would be waiting outside their stop. She could imagine it so vividly already, the beautiful feeling of a pile of crispy carbs entering and soothing her booze-lined stomach. However, to Tuuri's great annoyance, when they reached their destination she found this was the one Saturday the van wasn't there.  
  
“I guess I have bread at home. Ugh.” She looked again at the section of road that should have been holding her chips, as if she might somehow have just failed to locate it. “Unless Lalli's eaten it. He'd better not have.”  
  
“I mean, we left him playing Skyrim, so I doubt he's eaten _anything_. I was going to bring him some of those chips…”  
  
Emil had been correct. When Tuuri entered her flat, trying and failing to be quiet enough to appease all her roommates, the two of them entered the living room to find Lalli sitting on the floor, in the dark, controller still in hand. Leaving Emil with him, Tuuri tiptoed her way into the kitchen and opened the cupboards with a touch almost delicate enough to avoid the squeak. Her bread was there, and there was peanut butter in the fridge. Suddenly realising she was even hungrier than she'd thought, she made herself four slices of heavily-spread toast and wolfed them down, then returned to the living room waving one of the remaining slices. “Emil?”  
  
“Ah, I'm good. Don't like bread.”  
  
“Well, at least drink some water.”  
  
“I will!”  
  
Returning to the kitchen, Tuuri kept an ear out for Emil and Lalli's talking as she made herself a couple more slices. The volume of Emil's questions was just high enough to set her teeth on edge, while still quiet enough that she'd look weird and obsessive for telling him off. Seeing both of these two was nice, but the constant juggling act of being responsible for them was more than a little tiring.  
  
Munching her sixth and final slice of toast, Tuuri reminded herself that at least her next roommate situation would be nowhere near as fraught. She still wasn't over the face Onni had made when she'd first phrased it as "moving in with someone she met on the internet", before clarifying that she meant the same dressup-site forum every Finnish girl had somehow been on in the mid 2000s, and that he'd met Jaana and the rest of them several times now.  Of course, it would be sad to leave Barcelona, even for that. Tuuri had grown to love the feeling of being a foreigner somewhere, able to find something new to learn in even the most mundane daily routines. But her Erasmus year ending was far from the real end, and her Spanish wasn't bad, now. Her dreams of seeing South America were still far off, but getting the language down surely was a step she could count.  
  
She was starting to feel the effects of having chugged that bottle of water. Tiptoeing out of the kitchen again towards the bathroom, she overheard some of Lalli's low muttering and rolled her eyes at it. He was explaining his optimised virtual herb-gathering system to Emil in great detail, seemingly oblivious to how extremely tedious it sounded to everyone who wasn't him. Emil looked like he was barely conscious, resting his head on Lalli's thigh and letting Lalli absent-mindedly pat the fluff of his undercut. Tuuri entirely assumed he'd actually fallen asleep, until she returned from peeing to overhear Emil chip in with “No, I'm still listening, just sleepy…”  
  
Lalli would be getting some buzzcut-fluff of his own soon, and Tuuri couldn't help but think it was a good thing. While she understood people's issues with the military service perfectly well, she was also quite sure Onni had a point about it teaching you to follow a routine. It wasn't as if Lalli could put it off for much longer. His failure to finish high school had delayed all the milestones enough, and perhaps at least getting his service out of the way would help him get back on track. Given his only real grumble about it was that he'd have to change his hair, it couldn't hurt, at least. Emil worried, of course, but Tuuri was not at all convinced Lalli would find it as unpleasant as his boyfriend had. While she did remember one gay boy in her school year getting to avoid service on the basis of euphemistic 'gender issues’, she also guessed that only really applied to the ones where you could _tell_.  
  
“Please don't make any noise.” Tuuri let her worrying take the reins just once before she put herself to bed, kneeling down on the floor so she could whisper. “Maybe actually don't fold the couch out and just try to sleep on it as it is? Sorry. It's just really late and Michelle works full time and leaves really, really mean notes…”  
  
“Soon it counts as early morning anyway.” Lalli tilted his head to the sunrise coming through the curtains. “I'll just wait.”  
  
Tuuri looked at the scene in front of her and noticed that now he was done hearing all about Lalli's night, Emil had finally passed out. The two of them wouldn't be moving, she supposed. “Okay. Good night.”  
  
Sitting in bed, she listened for a moment to be really sure they weren't pulling out that couch. The pile of toast in her belly and her sore dancing muscles didn't let her worry for too long, though. She was almost asleep already when she saw the glow of her phone flashing and blearily pawed at it to reveal the message. It must indeed be early morning now, because apparently in Finland it was already a decent hour to be visiting IKEA. Jaana had messaged her with several captioned pictures of stuffed toys, and Tuuri sent off a clumsily-spelled response to the effect of “I'm excited to move in with you too!”  
  
She meant it, too. Her dreams were remarkably peaceful for drunk ones, and stayed that way until she was woken up by the fire alarm at noon. Emil was extremely apologetic. At least all of her roommates had been out.


	2. Part 1.2

**Finland, 2014**  
  
Snow fell, and fell, and fell. When the wind’s sharp gusts caught the flurries, the bus shelter’s roof and three walls only kept out so much, and snow began to collect in every little ridge of Emil’s jacket. Usually Finns would start to look unhappy with him about now, as if getting under the same bus shelter as them was a huge invasion of their personal space. The snowflakes were so thick, though, and the wind so bitter, that the man who’d got there before didn’t even seem to judge Emil when he tucked himself into a corner.   
  
Emil would be waiting here a little while, probably. He mentally kicked himself for the decision he’d made early that morning, when he’d told himself that Lalli’s ideas about what counted as sensible shoes were usually overkill. He didn’t know how he always managed to forget how much colder it got here. Back in Stockholm, the roads would continue half-committing to icing over all winter, but by mid-January Finland had piled up snow that could envelop his ankles, easily deep enough to start falling into his hi-tops. If the canvas didn’t soak through first, that is.   
  
He was rapidly resigning himself to not getting much use out of his skinny jeans, if the cold snap continued, and the minimal protection of his freshly-redone undercut left the metal in his earlobes painfully cold. He had to admit that his last-minute attempt to make up for all the group meals he had coming, a cunning tactic called “bringing no food for the boat”, probably wasn't helping. At least Lalli’s wool socks always fit him when he borrowed them.   
  
A bus came, and Emil’s silent shelter companion got on it, leaving him alone. Emil read a few of the things scrawled on the bus shelter’s walls - all incomprehensible to him, besides one of those ‘kirkkovene’ drawings and _TAPPARA_ enthusiastically scrawled in biro -  then decided to settle in for the wait. Sitting down on the shelter’s little bench and hugging his backpack, Emil watched the snow collect on the trees across the road. Another thing that still surprised him, every time he left Stockholm, was how implausibly postcard-esque huge swathes of rural Finland were the moment snow fell. The spruces’ broad limbs looked like they’d been carefully piped all over with meringue.  
  
And speaking of the many real things in Finland that outdid any stereotype, a small and decrepit-looking car was finally appearing from behind a turn in the road, which meant Onni was finally here.   
  
His ancient rustbucket - Emil knew absolutely nothing about cars, but he’d gathered that Onni liked this one mostly because he’d already learned by heart the quirks of repairing it - came to a grumbling stop in front of the shelter, and Onni waved at Emil to get in. Emil did not know how anyone managed to dress with the absolute consistency of either of the Hotakainen men, and could only be grateful that Lalli’s and Onni’s style similarity ended at the excessive camo print. He’d had to google what a _jussipaita_ was the first time Tuuri had described “her redneck relatives’ dress sense”, but he could never un-know that bit of Finnish vocabulary now, nor un-see the way Onni continued to pair said jumper style with a jacket and ushanka in mismatching shades of camo print.   
  
Whacking his heels against the doorframe to knock off some snow, Emil asked “Where’s Lalli?”  
  
“Things to do.”  
  
“Ah.” Emil knew by now that he probably wasn’t getting much elaboration. “Things that will be done… today?”  
  
“Yes. He knows that you are visit… visit _ing_.”   
  
“Oh. Uh, I didn’t mean I thought he like, didn’t.”  
  
“Mmh.” That seemed to be Onni’s expressiveness used up for the day, because he flicked the radio onto a rather prematurely dad-rockish station as he turned the car to face back up the narrow road, letting the drive to the village’s edge and through the forest proceed without a word further.   
  
Finally turning down an even narrower road and coming to a stop in front of Lalli’s grandma’s house, Onni handed Emil a key. “They come back soon.”  
  
“Oh, thanks. Are you gonna come in, or…?”  
  
Onni just mumbled something Emil took as a no, waited for him to exit the car, then trundled back off down the road to leave Emil alone. Emil looked around him, feeling suddenly very aware of the silence as the car-engine’s sound faded into the distance. Just as they were everywhere else, the woods that edged Ensi’s little house and garden were blanketed in thick snow, touched only by the small footprints of birds and the very occasional human step. Emil tried the door three or four times before he remembered that half the doors in Finland needed to be pressed on before the lock worked.   
  
With his damp shoes off and hanging by Ensi’s door, Emil poked through the house, feeling kind of invasive despite the fact he’d been here before. It was always a bit strange, coming to the house where Lalli had grown up, not least because seeing this place made a lot of things about him suddenly make far too much sense. There was a pot on the stove full of false morels soaking, ones Ensi had no doubt enlisted Lalli to go hunt down last summer, despite his lifelong hatred of all mushrooms. A taxidermied weasel in the bathroom served as someone’s idea of tasteful decoration, and when Emil entered Lalli's room, he squeaked at the skittering movement in the plexiglass box by the bed. “Ugh! Hello, Niiskuneiti.”   
  
He decided his best bet for now was to hunt for the wi-fi password. He knew Lalli had installed a router in here somewhere, and guessed that he’d also anticipated Emil hunting for it. Sure enough, the password was stuck in the middle of the only mirror in the house.   
  
Emil had been staring half-awake at Instagram for about half an hour when the lock turned, making the cat on his lap jump and race into another room. Emil jumped up just as abruptly, stumbling into the hall aware he was already grinning like a fool. He was greeted by a blast of cold air, a tiny old woman wearing waterproof pants with a resolutely sensible jacket, and Lalli with a bucket and fishing rod in each hand.   
  
“Ah. You are arrived.” Ensi spoke gravelly Swedish, her flat pronounciation of it closely competing with Onni’s English for the title of thickest Finnish accent Emil had ever heard.   
  
Lalli closed the door and took off his hat. Emil had still not quite emotionally accepted what the army had done to Lalli’s hair, but at least he could start growing it again now he was out. He stepped forward and lightly touched Lalli’s shoulder, the fact they’d not met in months competing awkwardly with the fact Ensi was right there. “What were you two doing?”   
  
“Hunting bears.” Lalli held up the bucket and let Emil lift its lid to look at the couple of dead fish inside.  
  
“Okay, yeah, stupid question.”   
  
“ _What_ you’re talking about?” Ensi poked Lalli in the side, making him flinch. She remained convinced that Lalli not speaking Swedish to Emil in front of her was a deliberate attempt to hide things, despite Lalli having shown her his trainwreck Swedish grades multiple times.   
  
“Ei mitään, Mummo!” _  
___  
“Hmph.” Ensi took part of their catch off Lalli and started hauling it towards the kitchen, drops of water sliding off her trousers as the bucket hit her leg. Emil resigned himself to today being the day he learned to gut the poor little fish they’d caught.


	3. Part 1.3

When Grandma had first met Emil, she had sized him up with a glance, turned to Lalli and told him “Well, I don’t like him, but I’ll feed him.” In the days afterwards, Emil seemed to regret making even this good an impression. Lalli did have to sympathise. He knew that being fed by Grandma was at best a dubious blessing.   
  
“I can tell he’s picking the meat out of my soups. What’s wrong with it? The cat gets plenty to eat without him giving her snacks.”  
  
“He doesn’t like eating it.”   
  
“Well, make him eat it till he likes it! It worked on you, even when you swore mushrooms and blueberries were _worse than death_ …”  
  
Lalli decided not to tell her about the fact he still took great pains to avoid both those things the moment she stopped looking. He also decided not to mention that Emil’s issue was less the flavourless chewiness, and more that he had a lot of fluffy feelings about anything that had, or had ever once had, a face. Lalli remembered the first time Emil had gotten drunk around him, and how he had bought an enormous pack of chicken nuggets, then become dramatically sad once he’d eaten enough of them to start sobering up and realise what he’d done. The gratitude Emil had shown when Lalli had eaten them for him had been bizarrely endearing.   
  
Unfortunately, under Ensi’s roof the rule was that one ate what one was given, no matter how many bits of fish gut were still floating in it. At least her Swedish was too rusty now for her to really get going on one of her lectures. Emil would probably feel bad if she managed to properly start with the “I’ve lived through two wars _and_ raising two sons, alone, in the Sixties!” screed, a potent one which she always saved especially for people who were being too soft. Lalli had long since worked out that scenario would go absolutely nowhere productive.   
  
All things considered, Emil's visit was not going as badly as it could have. It provided a very welcome distraction from the thoughts Lalli had been having ever since he'd formally notified the army that he would not be staying. The decision had not been easy. There had been a large part of him that had been hoping the army would suit him, only strengthened by the fact that in many ways it had. “Maybe the routine will do you good” was what Onni had said, and his instinct had been right. It almost made Lalli resent the ways Emil had changed his life since working his way into it, and that was the part of all this that he hated the most.  
  
He was fringing on resentment again the morning after Emil arrived. The act of kitting himself out to visit the woods was so reminiscent of his favourite parts of army life, and he couldn't help but feel some deja vu as he dug out both his skates and Onni's old ones. Being immediately labelled as scout material upon recruitment had been a blessing. While many had resented the long weeks of camping out in the woods, learning to make disgusting stew from the same moss the reindeer ate, Lalli had thrived on it. Looking out through the snowy window, he remembered the bleak fells that had watched over him every day during exercises up north, and felt a genuine pang of regret about leaving them behind. He hated knowing that if he'd never met Emil, he could have happily stayed in the army to take on as many lonely assignments as he could, forever. The looming question of what he was going to do with his life now would never even have needed to be asked.  
  
“Are those going to fit me?” Emil was holding Onni's hockey skates with a quizzical look. He had given in to Lalli's comments about needing to wear a hat even if it wrecked his hair, and the soft fleece lining Ensi's spare one framed his cheeks, making him look even more fluffy than usual. He tugged off one of his impractical warm-weather shoes, trying the skate on and making a ridiculous expression as he shook his leg to indicate the looseness. “I don't think I have enough socks to fill these out…”  
  
“I have plenty.” Lalli knew logically that a mere moment before he'd been half wishing he'd never met Emil. How odd to clearly remember that, and still be standing here with his heart melting into goo over Emil's stupid face.  
  
Snow had fallen all through the night, leaving the sky clear and the woods clean and soft. It was cold enough that Emil might even avoid his toes getting wet as they picked their way through the ankle-deep snowfall. Lalli had told him so when he handed over a few more pairs of socks for Emil to wrap his feet in. “In the very far north they don't try so hard to make the shoes waterproof, you know. In -30 it won't melt anyway, so they just make those reindeer boots as hairy as they can.”  
  
“I think it doesn't quite work when it's warmer than -30.” Emil had walked for most of a kilometer when he announced this, and Lalli just pointed ahead.  
  
“Good thing we're nearly there, then. The skates at least will work.”  
  
The two of them had dragged a snow shovel with them, and when they reached the small lake they set to work clearing a space on it. Emil tried to save time by skidding forward on flat feet, shovel held ahead of him as though he was a little digging machine, and sprayed snow in various directions that were not at all related to the pile Lalli had started. The scrapes and thuds of clearing snow persisted, embedding themselves into the snowy forest around them and dying, until they stood together on a patch of ice big enough to count as an ice-skating rink. The two of them took turns to get their skates on, leaning on each other with awkward wobbles, and when they were finally done Emil beamed. “This is so cute!”  
  
Lalli skated backwards around him in a circle, pirouetting and gliding to the edge, then stopping with a sideways brake that threw shards of ice into the snow. “It's good. We should keep it clear while you're here.”  
  
“Yes please!”  
  
Emil had clearly not been skating in a while, and Onni's old hockey skates were indeed a fair bit too big for him. The sight of him careening around, attempting to match Lalli's tricks and repeatedly falling over, made the heart-melt effect of earlier worse. Emil's cheeks turned pink in the cold, and wisps of his hair started to rearrange themselves. Lalli stopped him skating by taking one of his hands and pulling him closer, kissing his freezing nose, and getting a hopelessly cheesy smile in response.  
  
“Do you want to go home?” Emil asked, touching Lalli's cheek in return with a scratchy-mittened and snowy hand.  
  
“Maybe. Are you cold?  
  
“My ankles kind of hurt.”  
  
“Mm. Okay.” Lalli skated to the edge of their rink and beckoned Emil over so he could get his shoes back on.  
  
As they trudged home, Emil seemed quieter than usual. After several minutes of silent walking, he spoke up with what sounded like tentativeness. “Lalli? Are you still planning on moving out of your grandma’s place, now you're done with the army?”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“I'm really glad you decided to do something else.”  
  
Lalli didn't know what to say to that. It hasn't felt like a decision so much as the inevitable outcome of how life had changed. If anything, Emil had been the one to make decisions in starting it, although he would never have thought of what he'd done for Lalli that way. Nor did Lalli, really, usually. “I don't know what I will do now, though.”  
  
“I was reading something the other day about how you can do a nature guiding course near here. Or in Rovaniemi.”  
  
“I don't want to spend the rest of my life telling 300 Japanese tourists per day who Santa is. Which is what the 'nature guides’ in Rovaniemi do.”  
  
“Dang, really? That's basically false advertising, they make it sound like it's the sort of thing you'd like…”  
  
“Yep. Which is why I know what they do. I checked.”  
  
“Ah. Yeah, of course.”  
  
Emil got himself caught trying to walk through a deep snowdrift he'd mistaken for a ridge in the ground. Lalli took his turn dragging the snow shovel, and the silence returned for a moment.  
  
“Lalli? Are you okay?”  
  
Lalli again didn't know how to answer.  
  
“You just seem kind of off, and I wondered if you're like, doing okay with the um… I don't know, the leaving the army and stuff?”  
  
“Not really.”  
  
“...Can I help?”

They were almost back within sight of Grandma's house, and Lalli stopped, turning to Emil. He had run into an frost-laden branch while extracting himself from that snowdrift, and the fallen shards caught the morning sun to sparkle on his jacket, making him look like a pile of tacky gift-wrapping. Lalli once again found himself caught between knowing that it was Emil who had made his life many times more complicated, and wondering what on earth he had done with himself before knowing him.  
  
“I don't know.”  
  
Emil made a worried noise and stomped through the snow past Lalli. “Well, if I can't do anything now, I'm going to make you hot chocolate when we get back.”  
  
Ensi came back from her own wanderings to find the two of them in her kitchen, Emil pouring more hot chocolate into Lalli's mug from his own. “Of course he makes it with milk” was her only comment, and Emil knew better than to ask her to repeat it in Swedish.


	4. Part 1.4

Lalli and Tuuri always told Onni he drove like a grandma. This was because they were too young to remember anything about the last time their actual grandma had been allowed to drive. Onni was a much more careful driver than at least one grandma, and while he wasn't one to blow his own trumpet, he remained quite convinced that was a good thing.   
  
“Just reverse. There's nothing there.” Lalli called to Onni from near the apartment block's door, gesturing with one hand. He was unwisely free of a hat, despite the air only just starting to really smell of snowmelt today, and his regrowing hair lay on his head like a witch's broom straws. “Or just park. I don't even have much stuff to carry.”  
  
“It's safer to carry heavy things short distances. You have a bed.” Onni leaned out of his car window to shout this back at Lalli, feeling quite frustrated by how uncooperative everyone was being. Perhaps everyone else at trade school had slept through their lessons on workplace health, but Onni had very much taken on the message, and was not going to start living a life of poor lifting safety now. “Watch out. I'm backing up. Are you watching out?”  
  
“For the last time, Onni, yes he is! We're both watching!” Tuuri called from the open window of what was becoming Lalli's flat. She had taken it upon herself to help by beating a few of the woven-rag mats they collectively possessed, throwing all their dust out the window before they moved Lalli's possessions in on top of them. “Just back up!”  
  
Onni inched backwards, finally coming to a stop and leaving the car. Now that everything was in place, getting Lalli's stuff in proved to be short work. Onni was pleased to realise there was a storage space Lalli's moped could fit in. As much as Tuuri had assured him that she'd keep an eye on things, Onni couldn't help but feel a little nervous about his two younger relatives both living in a place as big as Tampere. Sure, Tuuri had survived Barcelona during that nail-biting Erasmus year, but it was totally possible that had been a fluke. Lalli didn't even really want to move here, so of course Onni was torn, even while being happy about him wanting to move out of Grandma’s place and get a job. As ever, there were just so many things that could go wrong. He could only reassure himself with the knowledge that the drive from Orivesi was not a long one.


	5. Part 2: Paid in Full

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know a lot of people liked the OCs from the Kasvatus series, so a large number of them have been recycled into this universe. Hopefully readers will remember some of them!

“They’re not… they do not think you are stealing it.” Lalli was mumbling down the phone even less coherently than usual. Despite Finland being an hour ahead, he had been nowhere near awake when Emil called for “backup” on today’s mid-day errand.   
  
“It looks so _suspicious_ though!” Emil glanced from side to side, phone jammed between his shoulder and his ear in a way that probably brought out the hideous squishiness in his chin, both his hands occupied by the handles of a giant set of boltcutters. The bike he was standing over was very much his, of course, but nobody else on this street knew that. Nor could he exactly prove the fact. People were looking at him funny, he was sure of it.   
  
“Oh, so they will think you like - that you went out on lunchtime, in daylight, to steal a bike, and yell whole time about how it’s looking like stealing?” Through the phone, Emil could hear the distant sound of Lalli’s coffee maker starting to gurgle. “What kind of shitty bike thief would do this?”   
  
“Um, not many, I guess. Maybe.” Emil fumbled to keep his phone smushed into his ear, his boltcutters nearly falling out of his hands as he did so. “Oh, God. How do you prove a bike is yours? I bought it for cash like two years ago…”   
  
“Do you need help there?”   
  
Emil jumped, nearly dropping both his phone and the boltcutters. He had been so absorbed in starting to panic again that he hadn’t noticed the policewoman wandering up to him. “Maybe!?”   
  
The policewoman seemed mostly mildly concerned by Emil’s apparent inability to use a simple pair of boltcutters. Cutting his bike free for him then handing the boltcutters back, she listened to his garbled semi-explanation of what had happened, leaving him with a recommendation for a brand of bike lock less likely to end in broken-off keys. When Emil finally got his phone back to his ear, Lalli was still on the line. “Who was the lady? What was she saying?”   
  
“Um. A police lady. She uh, cut my bike free for me. Hey, stop laughing! You’re so mean to me.” Emil again had his phone awkwardly jammed into his shoulder as he navigated his bike out of the rack, trying and failing to avoid jostling the other bikes that had become piled on it during its brief abandonment.   
  
“I did tell you so.” Lalli had clearly ingested some of the coffee. He sounded much less like he was struggling to string sentences together, and his snorts of amusement were something like liveliness.   
  
“You did.” With his general panic receding, Emil did now see that Lalli’s earlier response had been totally logical. “Um. Thanks for picking up.”   
  
“Obviously I’m going to pick up my phone if you call it.”   
  
“Sorry for waking you up, I mean.”   
  
“Ugh. It had to eventually happen.”   
  
“Good morning.”   
  
“Mm.”   
  
Emil stopped wasting minutes and let Lalli get on with his day. They had an actual Skype call planned for that evening anyway, and once he had his bike home, he could get on with part of the arm-length to-do list he had to finish before his next time visiting Finland. If it was possible to do anything, that is, with Marcus in the living room still glued to the recent _Wolfenstein_ release. Emil absolutely did not get how one man managed to make “playing a game by himself” into something that filled their entire flat, but given the state of the Stockholm housing market, having any roommate who reliably paid his half and wasn’t actively a serial killer still counted as a blessing. 

The weak winter had made spring in Stockholm more like a sad fade-out than the all-at-once blooming Emil remembered from back home in the north. Maybe he’d just failed to notice it so much, though, taking the metro for the last week. Now that he walked and cycled again, he could see that the bushes had somehow sprouted entire leaves since the last time he’d looked. Lalli hadn’t mentioned this happening yet in Finland, and the last update from him on any related topic had only included that “the lake is about half melted”. Emil kind of hoped that it would progress somewhat in the next two weeks. Tuuri had told him that the town she and Lalli now both lived in was much nicer in the summer, and Emil already knew he was "I-suppose-you're-here-anyway invited" to some kind of family grilling and sauna event on May Day. Given his experience of Finnish celebrations, he guessed this would at some point involve being outside without many clothes.   
  
Emil could hear the fact that Marcus was home from the moment he opened the door. He was indeed still filling the place with the sounds of automatic weaponry and dying… something. Zombies? Nazis? Nazi zombies? Whatever it was, the level of noise involved made Lalli’s placid herb-collecting in the Skyrim universe seem like it was barely the same hobby.   
  
“Is it good?” Emil poked his head through the door. “Are you like, winning?”   
  
“Son of a whore!” On the TV, Emil saw Marcus’s guy die, and the view fade into a red-and-black loading screen headed with German text. “Oh, yeah. And no, guess not.”   
  
“Oh. Well, good luck?” Emil really did not know what the appropriate well-wish was in this situation. He was so bad at video games that when he’d accepted his aunt’s recurring Farmville invite, he’d started kind of wishing the things in the game could die, just so those poor crops would finally get a chance to escape from his botched efforts to care for them. He left Marcus to it.   
  
Picking his way through the filthy dishes strewn all over the kitchen surfaces, Emil found a cup and started to make some coffee. The sound of Marcus killing things persisted all the way through the boiling of the water and spooning of the granules, then continued still while Emil sat at their tiny kitchen table and opened his laptop to try to write a to-do list. It was incredibly difficult to concentrate on this already too-little-too-late attempt to get his life in order before he next went to Finland. Emil got up and shut the door.   
  
It wasn’t like Marcus had _no_ redeeming features. He could hold down a job, and sometimes haphazardly hoovered if a really attractive girl was coming over, and stuff. However, when they’d moved in together, it had taken Marcus all of a week to work out one or two facts about Emil and respond with “Oh wait, you’re a gay vegetarian? So like... do you eat sausage or not?” before laughing as if this was the funniest and most original joke ever invented. The level of Marcus’s wit had not improved in the time they’d lived together, and Emil was still waiting for him to work out that the “improved, less oversensitive” level of laughter at his jokes was entirely forced. Granted, he was sometimes hilarious, but he seemed to have no idea at all where the line was.   
  
Emil managed to make a list about 20 points long, which included “do NOT respond to any more Grindr profiles without faces” and “STOP EATING SNACKS THEY MAKE YOU FAT”. Emil was already extremely hungry, despite having eaten easily too much for breakfast. With his general existential despair almost certainly leading within a day to needing some kind of validation, it seemed unlikely he’d keep either of these resolutions very well. At least "do squats EVERY day" and “FIND A NEW JOB!!” were perhaps achievable. The latter had better be. Those “unforgivable and frankly bizarre health and safety incidents” that had gotten him fired two weeks ago had turned out to be some of his most catastrophic mistakes yet, as losing both his job and his employee discount at H&M had been a terrible double hit on his finances. His high-school nickname of "Disästerström" now felt more apt than ever.   
  
He really wished he’d known this was going to happen when he had splashed out on plane tickets instead of boat tickets. At least Lalli was almost painfully sensible about most such things, and would stop him spending too much money once he was actually in Finland.   
  
Emil sighed and decided that maybe just trying to work on the final project for his course was the better idea for now. He would find something else to do for money eventually, he was sure of it. He would call Lalli tonight, and feel a bit more sane afterwards, and maybe after that this chaotic list of things to fix would start to make some kind of sense. Or maybe he’d just shave the sides of his undercut a little higher. If you couldn’t actually feel on top of your life, cutting more of your hair off was usually a pretty good substitute.


	6. Part 2.2

Tuuri was just about ready to drive this car off the road and into the lake they were passing. If it hadn’t actually been Onni’s, and loaned only on the promise of impeccable driving, she might have. She should have just told Emil to get the train to Tampere, like he did when he normally got the boat to Turku, but had been foolish enough to mention that she would be driving back from Estonia on the same evening his plane arrived.  _ Not _ picking him up when she went past Vantaa would have been rude. Unfortunately, the imagined awkwardness of telling Emil “sorry, but please just get the train” turned out to be nothing in comparison to the real, present awkwardness of having both him and Jaana in the same car.    
  
Emil seemed like he was totally oblivious to Tuuri’s silent praying that he would just shut up for the duration of the ride. Jaana was acting for all the world as if she didn’t particularly care about Emil being jammed in the back with their crates of Estonian bargain vodka, and that she was merely tuning out his rambling. Was it nervous rambling? Tuuri knew he must feel kind of bad about what had happened, although with Emil, she could still never entirely tell if the absolute nonsense that came out of his mouth sometimes was the product of too little confidence or too much.   
  
Emil mentioned his roommate, and Tuuri cringed. Technically, that roommate was the source of this whole awful situation. When Emil had gone ahead and added half of Tuuri’s local friends on Facebook, Tuuri had thought nothing much of it, given they’d already been including him in their Vappu plan-making anyway. Coming home from work one day to find a twenty-comment thread of him “debating” with Jaana under some video he’d shared from Marcus had been a nightmare. Tuuri had watched the video in question. It was something she might have found funny when she was twelve and had only met people from tiny Finnish villages, which was to say it was definitely, horribly offensive.   
  
Into one chat window had gone: _Emil, please, for the love of God stop digging. Yes, I know you’re trying to explain why you think it’s funny, that is MAKING IT WORSE! Yes, I know you love spring rolls and Jackie Chan movies, that doesn’t mean you can’t be - look, just apologise to her and delete it! You’re making this really, really hard for me!_  
  
Into another had gone: _Jaana, I’m super sorry. He’s from Dalarna and got homeschooled by his weirdo parents there. I’m working on him, I promise._ _  
_ _  
_Tuuri still felt mild guilt about strategically leaving out the fact Emil had also spent some time at school in Stockholm, and had then lived there for a couple more years, but the way she’d put it had technically been true. He’d gotten noticeably less bad over the time she’d known him, at least.  
  
“Ohh my gooood.” Emil was still filling up the dead air with more awkward rambling. “Did I tell you that they almost didn’t even let me on my flight on the way over?”  
  
“Oh! Not yet you didn’t!” Oh, Christ. Tuuri could hear herself squeaking from how tightly the anxiety was catching her throat. Maybe her citalopram needed to be at a higher dose after all. Or maybe Emil could shut up for two minutes. At least this sounded like a topic he couldn’t possibly embarrass her over.   
  
“Oh man, it was the worst. So they I put my bag through the scanner, right, and I had totally forgotten there were some firecrackers in the very bottom? From the final production we’re rehearsing…”  
  
Tuuri could physically feel the _can you believe this tool?_ look Jaana must be giving her from the passenger seat.   
  
“... and I had to explain to like _four_ different people that it was just because I forgot, right, and even then they took like, a photocopy of my passport for some reason, and I totally almost missed my flight. Like, why would they do that? _Obviously_ I’m not like, _actually a terrorist_ …”  
  
Tuuri remembered how horribly enlightening it had been the one time she’d been on a holiday with Jaana that had involved a plane connection, and how utterly resigned her friend had been to the experience of being treated like live ammunition, merely due to having _Hassan_ in her passport’s surname field. It had put Tuuri’s mild jealousy of Jaana’s ability to tan and naturally curly black hair into some perspective, for sure. Slapping Emil into silence was not an option, so she spent her energy on wishing that melting into the earth and disappearing could be instead.   
  
“...but anyway, I guess this new thing I’m doing with my hair must be working, because I __totally charmed my way out of having to get searched properly. Guess I’m just lucky!”  
  
“Guess so! That must be it!” Tuuri’s over-chipperness might have actually successfully masked the high alert her brain was on, because Emil’s compulsive silence-filling finally stopped for the last twenty minutes of the drive to Tampere.   
  
The forest turned into suburbs, the evening silhouettes of the trees morphing into the little points of Tampere's surburban rooftops, and Tuuri felt some relief as they finally passed the Lielahti shopping centre with its first sight of the city centre's blockiness. Above the road, a digital sign displayed the respective temperatures of the air and tarmac, a miserable +3 degrees in both cases that spoke of typically awful Vappu weather to come. Atop the ridge of the long esker that stretched alongside the highway and into town, a freight train rumbled down the tracks. They could count themselves as being back now. “Um, Emil? Where in town did Lalli say he’d meet you?”  
  
“He said to just meet him in the central square?”  
  
“Oh.” Tuuri wondered if Lalli would ever start thinking about things like how inconvenient it was for her to park in the centre. “Um, if it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll drop you somewhere nearby and you can walk?”  
  
“If you think I won’t get lost? I’m kind of bad at maps.”  
  
“Oh, you can’t possibly get lost. Not a chance.” Tuuri had no confidence in her statement at all, but getting Emil out of her car and finally being able to relax was now her number one priority. Pulling briefly into an arbitrary carpark, she looked into the back seat to make sure he hadn’t left anything with them. “Got your stuff? Definitely all of it?”  
  
“Oh, I just remembered! I did get that snus for your brother, and brought you some stuff from the Lush store since you said there isn’t one over here yet, should I just leave them where I was sitting or - ”   
  
“Yes leave them there! You want to go up that road there for a while! Great! Okay! Bye!”  
  
It was only after she’d started to pull off the kerb and saw Jaana take her headphones out that Tuuri realised Jaana must have been wearing them for some time. “Wait, how long have you had those in for?”  
  
“Eh? Since like, ten minutes after we picked him up. Whenever he started with the wildly incorrect opinions about the new season of Drag Race…”  
  
“So you didn’t hear a word he said the whole way?”  
  
“Nope. The packet didn’t lie about ‘turbo noise cancelling’, or however it put it. Sorry to abandon you to the nonsense.”  
  
Tuuri felt like she was about to be sick as her cresting anxiety broke like a wave hitting a sandbank. Intellectually, she could never quite make sense of that reaction.   
  
“He didn’t drink any of our beer, right?” Jaana was craning around to look at the back seat. “Oh, nope. Wait, shit, did we get the wrong kind of lonkero?”  
  
“I guess Miri doesn’t mind the wrong kind too much, and it’s not like you even know what you’re drinking past 2pm on Vappu.” Tuuri pulled into the street they lived on and tried to work out where exactly they were meant to park. She suspected they needed to have asked for that when they moved in. “Do you think Onni will judge me for taking a random parking spot?”  
  
“Is there anything he doesn’t judge you for?”  
  
“Too real! I guess I’ll just park at the nearest shop…”  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Vappu is the "May Day" event Emil referred to in the last chapter. It is celebrated very enthusiastically in Finland. 
> 
> Going to Estonia to buy booze is such a common Finnish tactic that the harbour in Estonia's capital Tallinn is lined with liquor stores, so that the Finnish booze tourists don't need to come any further in and bother even more people.
> 
> Dalarna is the area where most of the Swedes seem to have survived in the SSSS-verse, and Word of God says that Emil has the accent/dialect from that area. In our universe, it is basically Sweden's "bible belt", and social progress arrives there infamously slowly. 
> 
> Lonkero is a mix of gin and grapefruit juice that is bizarrely popular in Finland, possibly solely because it was invented there and people are therefore very proud of it.


	7. Part 2.3

Lalli had known Emil was coming over at the end of April for over a month now, and yet when he finally realised that the given date was in two days, it was weirdly shocking. At least he had two days’ notice to adjust how he’d expected this week to go, and hadn’t already been shopping. His usual tactic of simply purchasing fourteen ham-and-cheese frozen pizzas, then setting alarms to remind him to eat one twice a day, suited him perfectly well. He was however aware that to normal people, and also probably Emil, it came off as incredibly sad. It took him half an hour of wandering around the shop, trying to remember what it was that humans usually ate, before he realised that merely replacing ham-and-cheese pizzas with plain cheese pizzas would be enough to get the two of them through the first day. Emil always had a lot more ideas about this sort of thing. Letting him pick out stuff would probably be more fun for him anyway.     
  
The day before Emil arrived, Lalli actually opened his bathroom cupboard door enough to use the mirror on the inside. The past few weeks had been weirdly rough, and he could see that it kind of showed. He had made some effort already to find a job despite the nigh-complete hopelessness of that without a high-school certificate, but without his grandma barging in all the time demanding things, it was concerningly easy to start playing Skyrim and realise three to four days later that he just hadn’t stopped. Doing the bare minimum that the dole office asked of him really didn’t take that much time out of the day, and Tuuri was busy enough that her attempts to make him go into town could never be that frequent. Peering at himself, he wondered how exactly one went about improving the mess here.  
  
Removing the tragically weak patch of hair that had grown on his chin sometime in the last month was a start. The fact Lalli barely ever needed to shave meant that it had still never truly become second nature, and he still completed this little ritual exactly in line with the steps Onni had taught him in the awkward lesson he’d needed to give when Lalli had been seventeen. With that done, Lalli squinted into the mirror again, and realised that his regrowing hair had started to fall into an unfortunate mullet-type shape that once again made him think of Onni. Hacking a little off the back went well enough. Lalli figured that if it looked truly terrible, at least Emil would probably enjoy fixing it.  
  
If Emil enjoyed seeing any of this mess, that is. The thought did occur to him again, as he finally set out to go fetch Emil from the town square, that the mediocre patch-up efforts he’d made did very little to correct the fact that there was really nothing going for Lalli at the moment. It was hard to not think too constantly about how little he was doing with his life overall, and while he’d never entirely understood what it was that Emil saw in him, it seemed even more mysterious now that he’d spent the last month like this. The wish that Lalli could just be assigned some role he was capable of doing, then do that as well as he could forever, was of course a totally hopeless one. As Tuuri constantly reminded him, even just finishing that final year of high school would require  _ being engaged in his future _ , which Lalli knew full well shouldn’t be anywhere near as difficult as he found it. He did secretly maintain, though, that he might well be good at a lot of things if getting to try them didn't involve the near impossible task of filling out forty forms.    
  
It was approximately an hour and a half’s walk to the town centre at his usual pace, so he had set off the moment he heard the others had picked Emil up from Vantaa. The awkward late April weather made his hoodie feel too warm for the task within twenty minutes, while also making it unwise to take it off. The light was just about gone by the time he reached the south end of Iidesjärvi, but still the birdwatching tower by the lake remained a visible silhouette against the sky. Lalli crossed the road into the little nature reserve. He should probably take this path more often. The lake was a calm little spit of water that drove its northern point almost all the way into the town centre, but the only person he saw while taking the worn-down dirt track beside it was one old lady doing the very first of the work on the allotments there.    
  
Lalli took the bridge over the rapids, passed some bars and a kebab shop, then finally found himself in the town square. Parking himself on one of the little benches, he watched the buses pass through the central exchange for a while, then started to observe the pigeons that constantly hunted among the paving-stones for chips. They were all a little fat, and totally fearless when it came to approaching him, one almost sitting on his legs despite no attempts from him to attract them. Above the square, a digital display switched a few times a minute between showing the temperature and the time. Around the fourth time he looked up to check it, Lalli began to wonder where on earth Emil was. It felt like he should have been in Tampere around half an hour ago.    
  
Oh, fuck. Lalli shoved a hand into his hoodie pocket. Had he forgotten his phone again? It would be so gratingly, frustratingly like him if he had. Searching in the many pockets of his cargo pants, Lalli at first found only his knife, and thought for a moment that his phone really was all the way back in his flat. It ended up announcing its presence itself from the depths of a pocket on his ankle. As the default Nokia ringtone blared out of the decade-old brick phone at full volume, a pigeon fled the noise with the ridiculous fast waddle of a bird only half-concerned about getting away, and Lalli recognised the number with relief. “Emil?”   
  
“Um. So you know how you said to meet you in the central square.”   
  
“It seems like you did not do that.”   
  
“Sorry! Tuuri told me there was no way I could get lost from where she dropped me off…”   
  
Lalli wondered if Tuuri would ever stop disregarding basic plans without even bothering to explain why. “Okay. Where are you?”   
  
“Uhhhhh….” Lalli could almost hear the way Emil was likely turning around, trying to find some kind of sign. “I’m near a lake?”    
  
“That doesn’t narrow it down at all.” Lalli had aimlessly walked around Tampere quite a lot since moving here, had already discovered 8 lakes of various sizes, and was quite sure there must be more.    
  
“It’s an absolutely massive one, I walked along the side of it for ages before I called you.”   
  
“Tampere is exactly between two different giant lakes.”   
  
“Oh, well then, shit... Oh wait! I can see a whole bunch of boats now… A really thin bridge thing? Oh, a sports stadium, I think! You don’t have two of those too, right?”   
  
Lalli finally thought he recognised it. “Go to the middle of the ‘bridge thing’ and stop walking!”    
  
Lalli crossed the road and trotted around the corner, heading towards the little harbour that was kept where the rapids flowing from Näsijärvi met the beginnings of Pyhäjärvi. There was indeed a sports stadium there on one side, a little collection of stalls that sold  _ mustamakkara _ on the other, and a bridge connecting the two. In the centre of the bridge was a figure with a stance Lalli could not mistake, the little shock of golden hair on his head visible even in the late dusk.    
  
Emil didn’t notice Lalli’s approach at first, still aimlessly scrolling through his phone and sighing before starting to stare again into the rapids below. Lalli tapped him on the shoulder, and Emil jumped so hard he nearly dropped his phone into the lake. “Hey! That was fast!”    
  
“Mm. You’d almost found it.”    
  
“Oh!” Emil looked pleased with himself.    
  
Lalli always wondered if there was something kind of wrong with him for taking a couple of minutes to be fully pleased to see Emil. His first reaction was always a vague sense that it was going to actually be terrible, having to share his bed and have an extra person in his space for a few days. Despite the fact they’d been doing this visiting back-and-forth for so long it actually shocked people -  _ you’ve been dating someone for years already, at this age? _ \- the weirdly large 'feeling of adjustment' never totally went away.    
  
“So, do we get a bus?” Emil was shouldering his bag and tucking what looked like a big roll of fabric under one arm. With both his hands occupied, the long bit of his hair fell over his eyes, and he had an undignified little moment of trying to blow it upwards. He’d given himself some variation on his usual haircut that bordered on a floppy mohawk. Lalli tucked it back for him, brushing Emil’s cheek as he took his hand away, and remembered very suddenly why they had bothered to do this for so long.    
  
It was, it turned out, a huge relief to be around someone who didn’t make conversation feel like a chore or a test. Riding the number 10 bus almost to its very end point was enough time for Lalli to relax as Emil relayed a story he’d been saving for the chance to tell in person.    
  
“...So he was like, oh man, I’m super sorry, I didn’t expect it to happen that fast, and I was like, oh, no worries, I guess it happens. Obviously I was _thinking_ ‘wow, what a waste of a bus ticket’ but you can’t just  _ say _ that I guess… anyway, then,  _ then _ he stands up and is like ‘No, you stay there, I know you’re not done.  _ My roomie is home _ , I’ll get him…’”    
  
“Oh  _ no _ .” Based on Emil’s history of foul, embarrassing hookup-app stories, Lalli was pretty sure this was going exactly where it sounded like, but the humour was always going to be in the dramatically aggrieved way Emil told him about it.    
  
“ _ Oh _ yes. So he goes and knocks on the other door of the apartment, which I hadn’t even  _ noticed _ before, and the other guy comes out like ‘so I heard you’re not done in there’, as if this, like, offering a surprise round two is the most normal interaction in the world...”   
  
“You say, as if you didn’t immediately let him...”   
  
“I’m not done with the story!”   
  
“You did though, didn’t you? God. You're terrible.”   
  
Emil made one of his  _ well, and what if I did _ faces, putting on an exaggerated air of being wounded by how easily Lalli believed these undignified acts of him. “I  _ had _ already paid for a bus ticket across the suburbs…”    
  
The way Lalli started to loudly giggle and flap one hand made the sweat-marked man sitting opposite them jump, spilling some of his beer on his trackpants.    
  
“The  _ worst _ part though, right…” Emil, apparently not for the first time recently, had it in him to go for a bit longer.    
  
“ _ Worse _ than finding out you walked into a tacky porn plotline?”   
  
“They had no toilet paper in their house. Like, literally none. Zero. And just a like… layer, of grime, everywhere. I swear fully 90% of men are beyond help, Lalli.”    
  
Lalli noticed, in the nick of time, that they needed to stop the bus. “Uh, we get off here.”   
  
Once they had arrived home, Lalli discovered that the roll of fabric that Emil had carted all the way from Sweden was a blanket, sewn with long rows of sections that were filled with heavy pellets. “I dunno, I saw it in one of those ‘easy projects’ videos and made it on my aunt’s sewing machine, it just seemed like the kind of thing you’d like”. Lalli sat underneath it for a moment and almost fell asleep on the spot. Emil wriggling under it to join him made it slightly less heavy and good, but Lalli wrapped himself around him, curling into his lap and snuggling into the sweet fancy-shower-gel smell of his neck with a feeling of peace that he always seemed to forget was possible.    
  
“I’m glad you like it” Emil whispered, his hand sliding up Lalli’s back to rub it in a little circle. 

“Mm.” Lalli did indeed like it, but it also definitely served to make him even less articulate than usual.    
  
“It sounds like it’s been kind of a bad time for you lately.”   
  
Lalli supposed it had. From where he was now, it felt like it couldn’t possibly have been that terrible. Yes, all the same problems would still be there once Emil had left, but at least for the next week, returning some of this lovely feeling was something he thought he could do. Lalli knew there was a doughnut shop at the top of the biggest hill in town, one everyone who noticed such things seemed to think was charming, with a viewing tower that let you see both of the two lakes. Being taken somewhere they could hold hands and look at spring blooming was exactly the kind of thing Emil lost his mind for. Lalli might feel a lot of the time like he could barely understand the 'relationship goals' most people seemed to have, but once he was actually doing this, it always seemed to make sense. 


	8. Part 2.4

“It’s not cold! It’s not cold! It’s not -  _ aiyiiiiiiiiiiii! _ ”   
  
The crane lowered the cage full of first-year university students into the barely-unfrozen rapids, turning their optimistic chant into a scream that made the crowd on both sides of the river whoop in response. Onni could hear Lalli behind him, giving Emil a rambling explanation of the Vappu tradition of throwing students into the rapids between the lakes for luck. The latter seemed annoyed that there was no fire. Apparently in Sweden, for this holiday, there was always fire. Well, he was welcome to stay in Sweden, if Vappu in Tampere was such a disappointment.    
  
Onni knew Lalli had started drinking long before he’d be forced to stand in a crowd of loud people, and was immensely jealous of the fact. The parades had already broken up, meaning the morning time-filler of marching with the union was over. Now, being the only person who could be fully trusted to not touch a drop before driving everyone to Grandma's house was a curse. He hated crowds almost as much as Lalli did, and was kind of glad Lalli’s drink of choice had been so thoroughly of the budget-conscious “well, it’s going to taste bad anyway” variety. No power on earth but his own paranoia could stop Onni from getting drunk as soon as possible on Vappu, and the only option being taking his little cousin’s bottle of barrel-scraping Sisu Viina did slightly help his resolve.   
  
The cage was raised out of the lake and the students deposited on the shoreline. Onni could see one shedding her sodding, icy overalls before even getting to the sauna they had waiting there. Someone took the announcer’s mic and started screaming  _ “Tappara! Tappara!” _ on repeat, while other groups of students cheered on the next unfortunate batch of dunkees with a chorus of vuvuzelas and tuneless hooting. God, Onni could not wait to finally start drinking.    
  
Tuuri finally found them again, having previously wandered off to converse with another one of the approximately hundred people she seemed to know here. She bumped into Onni, spilling a little of her lonkero on him. "Onnii-ii! Is someone regretting not letting me be the designated driver this year?"   
  
"Hmph." Onni hoped she wouldn't drink so much she had a dysfunctional hangover tomorrow. He very much wanted to ask her opinion on one of his mechanical projects.    
  
The moment the festivities in town were over, Onni herded everyone into the car. He should have just taken Tuuri up on her offer to drive this time. The horrible worry of wondering if someone not-him would have just forgotten not to drink would have faded after the first few cans anyway.    
  
Lalli and his godawful boyfriend were being slow, as the latter tried to strike up a conversation with some passerby and Lalli wandered off to the side, rendered even more of a space cadet than his average by the amount of viina he’d consumed and the earplugs he was doubtless wearing by now. He was getting a window seat even more urgently than usual, then. At least if he vomited, it would likely sober him up a bit. Once everyone had finally been collected and made to stay in their seats, Onni lowered himself into the driver’s seat and desperately tried to take a moment before starting the ignition.    
  
“Is it a bit annoying being the only sober one, Onni?” Tuuri had bagged the passenger seat, relegating both boys to the back. She seemed to be having a great time, giggling as she finished the last of her lonkero and shoved the can into the canvas bag now wedged between her knees.    
  
“A bit, yes, Tuuri.” Onni took a deep breath. “Can you tell them in the back to quiet down, please?”   
  
“Onni says to be QUIET!” yelled Tuuri, turning just far enough into her sentence to have the word  _ quiet _ shouted directly into Onni’s ear.    
  
“I hear...ed him.” Lalli sounded queasy already having just sat down in the car, and with a strange but definitely familiar gurgle began to frantically roll down the window.  
  
“Ooh! I think I did too!  _ Hiljuir? _ It’s ‘quiet’, right?” Emil’s enthusiasm for communicating his weak grasp of Finnish was so great that it apparently totally overshadowed any ability to actually do what Onni had asked.    
  
“Lalli’s puking out the window.” Tuuri stated the obvious while cracking open another can.    
  
Onni decided to just start driving. Being the lone sober person was not going to get any better until they were at Grandma’s, and probably not until well after the sauna had been lit, the sausages had started grilling, and Onni had finally had the chance to get five or six beers in. Lalli only puked one extra time on the hour-long drive out, and Tuuri only loudly announced that she needed to pee by the roadside once too. That was about the only good thing Onni could say about the whole experience. 

When they finally reached Grandma’s house, Onni entertained brief hope that she would not already be drinking. He did not know why he still bothered to do this on any holiday, let alone Vappu. She came to the door wearing her springtime Crocs and shorts, leaning on the stick she'd only recently been convinced to use with one hand, holding her beer in the other.    
  
“The doctor did say you’re not meant to be drinking much, Grandma. It’s not good for someone who’ll be  _ ninety-five _ soon” said Onni with his worst attempt at firmness. The younger three piled out of the car.    
  
“Oh, piss to that” said Grandma. “I lit the sauna already, by the way. Since you lot decided to be late.”   
  
“Oh. Thank you.” Onni had been kind of looking forward to doing that part, but he supposed this was considerate behaviour, technically.    
  
At least he could get a moment’s peace while putting the ancient grill together, assembling all its constituent parts from their storage in the shed for the first time that year. The webs of last summer’s spiders still hung around enough to catch a little in his hair, and the door protested against the weight of his shoulder as he tried to jam it open to get a little light. Once he’d found all the bits, he decided it was more than time to finally crack open a beer. The grill at least seemed to be getting going without a fight, and as he prodded at the slowly igniting coals, Onni noticed that Lalli and Emil had placed a chopping board on the grimy garden table by the back door. While Lalli had indeed sobered up a little in the car, the two of them were merrily drinking again, both sipping from tins as they chopped up various suspiciously non-sausage items and skewered them. They appeared to be making some kind of shashlik with pepper chunks and the grilling cheese Tuuri always insisted on calling  _ halloumi _ , which Onni highly doubted Lalli would even bother tasting.    
  
“You could have done this without firestarters.” Onni jumped as Grandma appeared beside him as if from thin air. He had no idea how she managed to move as slowly as she did nowadays while also maintaining her unnerving sneakiness. “There’s birch bark in the shed, too. Lalli  _ almost _ made a box of it without any bad bits, too.”    
  
Normally, Onni would have been a bit defensive of Lalli in the face of Grandma’s hyper-critical appraisal. As much as he logically knew it hadn't really been possible to do it differently, he still felt guilty on some level for only taking Tuuri with him when escaping their grandma's custody at eighteen. He could hear that obnoxiously cheerful-sounding sing-song Swedish voice, though, when Emil called Tuuri over to discuss what else they should put on their fancy grill items. “You know, I have no idea what Lalli sees in that one.”   
  
Grandma barked with laughter that almost faded into the sound of her choking on her beer. " _ I _ bloody well do! Come on.”   
  
“You do?” Onni wondered if he was about to receive some piece of information that was going to change his whole perspective on this seemingly inherently grating Swedish boy. “He seems mostly quite annoying.”   
  
“Oh, he is! I hate him. But I’ve been young, you know. I have eyes.”   
  
“Eh?”   
  
“I’ve seen him bend over when he drops things! Come on. It’s pretty clear what the upside is here…”   
  
“Grandma!”   
  
“Come on! You’ve _seen_ his ass…”   
  
“ _ Obviously _ I haven’t looked at it!” Onni hissed this reply out, feeling more keenly than ever that sobriety was a curse today. He glanced over to the vegetable-prep table, desperately hoping nobody had heard that particular “classic Ensi” remark. They were blessedly engrossed in putting unrecognisable green things on sticks.    
  
“Well, do yourself a favour sometime!” Grandma took another sip of her beer.     
  
“Jesus Christ, Grandma.” Onni’s first beer was gone. What a fantastic time for a second and third one.    
  
The weird little vegetable-cutting party across the garden did eventually end, and Tuuri brought a fistful of the skewers over, arranging a few of them carefully away from any sausagey drips. “Those are Emil’s.”   
  
“Oh. Right. I’ll remember.” Seeing the care Tuuri put into accommodating her friend, Onni felt a twinge of fresh guilt for gossiping about his and Lalli’s situation a moment earlier. Tuuri was decidedly wobbly, and Onni had finally downed enough beer to start to feel like the world was pleasantly soft around the edges. “Hey. Don’t drink too much, Tuuri.”    
  
Tuuri grinned impishly and took the second-to-last of the six-pack Onni had been keeping on the side of the grill. “Because you never drink  _ ever _ , right Onni?”   
  
“You…  _ you _ actually have brain cells worth preserving.” Onni wondered if he was quite drunk enough to be getting into this. Probably not nearly far gone enough to really have an excuse. “ _ You _ need to look after yourself.”    
  
Tuuri looked at Onni in that way she did when she thought he was being impossibly daft, which made it a bit surprising when she hugged him. “Oh, bless you! I do know you care, you know! Even though you’re such a big  _ grump _ …”   
  
“Mm.” Oh, dear. Onni had shared an emotion before the seventh beer, and this was of course turning out to be a mistake. It was nice to have someone hug him, though. With Tuuri grown up and living in all sorts of places, it was a very rare occasion. He awkwardly placed his arms around her, trying to avoid getting her hair with the greasy grilling tongs.   
  
“Naw!” Tuuri squeezed him, tucking her head under his chin for a moment. “I’m gonna go check if Grandma is doing something weird!”    
  
“Mm. Good idea.” Onni let her go, feeling like he could have done with being hugged for just a moment longer. Tuuri’s tipsy wandering took her around the side of the house, and Onni heard the muffled sound of her starting to speak to their grandma. All was well on that end, then.    
  
He moved some things onto the cooler part of the grill. They didn’t want to eat all of this right before going to sauna. A bird landed near his feet, and Onni watched it bounce along the ground. A tiny white wagtail, its sharp face pale against its dark suit like a little thespian, one of Onni's favourite portents of the coming summer. "You should go back to the lakeshore, friend", he told it. "The smoke here will drive away all the bugs, none left for you." The little bird cocked its head and, as if understanding him, flitted to the nearest tree before making its way towards the distant water. Onni watched after where it had gone, taking a few more sips of his beer and feeling a modicum of peace for the first moment that day.   
  
That is, until his eyes wandered across the yard to the little table Emil and Lalli had remained sitting at. Lalli still had the knife in his hands, and was semi-fluently gesturing with it, he and Emil chatting about something that the two of them seemed to find absolutely hilarious. From over here, Onni couldn’t quite follow it. He followed perfectly well, though, when Lalli leaned over and waggled the tip of that knife by Emil's face in a way that was bizarrely flirtatious. Emil responding with quirked eyebrows and one of those weird little tongue-biting smiles was pretty unmistakable as a reaction.    
  
Christ on a bike. Onni wanted to think about whatever was implied by that even less than he wanted to think about what Ensi had said. Hadn't Lalli been about eight years old last time he looked? There was still one beer left in this six-pack, and the two women returned from the other side of the house before Onni finished it. Emil ate only one of the weird shashliks, despite Onni's effort to keep them apart. How annoying. At least Tuuri seemed to mean it when she set a whole pile of them under the hood of the cooling grill, claiming that she would absolutely be back for them after a thorough sauna.    
  
Onni did not know how everyone took so long to move from garden to sauna. Besides him, it was actually Emil who got his clothes off the fastest. Emil sat in the sauna like he wasn’t sure what he was meant to be doing in there, legs crossed and hands jammed under his thighs, his weird haircut deflated by the steam. Now that he’d finally gotten hold of a bottle of real spirits, though, Onni was full of rosy-minded ideas. The one that floated to the surface now was that perhaps this was a situation where he could bond with even Emil.    
  
He tossed another ladleful of water onto the kiuas, letting the perhaps-even-companianable silence settle with the löyly, then leaned comfortably onto his knees. He was not the greatest talker at the best of times, less so when drunk and even less so in English, but he felt brave enough now to have a go at this. “Emil.”   
  
“Yes?” Emil sat upright with the air someone who'd just realised there was a bee in their shirt.    
  
“What team, you are supporting?” Wonderful. Onni had nailed it.    
  
“Um. I mean, you’ve… you’ve seen that I’m dating your cousin, Onni.”    
  
Onni wondered why Emil felt the need to give this unfortunate and situationally nonsensical reminder. Oh well. He was in a good mood, and would keep trying. “Yes. I think this year, the local  _ Liiga _ here, it is quite exciting. Is it so in Sweden, also?”    
  
Emil took a moment to answer. “...Oh!  _ Football _ ?”   
  
Onni wondered what had gone wrong here. “Ice hockey.”   
  
_ “Ohhhh.  _ Right, yeah, of course. Um... hockey isn’t... very big, um, popular, in Sweden, actually. I think?”   
  
That didn’t sound right at all. “Really?”   
  
“Yeah, sorry. Basically nobody cares about it. Do we like, win ever, even?”   
  
Ah. It was like that, then. Emil was responding to this olive branch being extended by mocking him. Well, Onni knew when to stop wasting his effort, and  threw three more ladlefuls on the kiuas.   
  
“Holy  _ shit _ \- oof, um, that’s quite warm!”    
  
“Mm. You can leave, if it is too warm for you.”   
  
“We made it!” Tuuri finally arrived, bringing Lalli and Grandma with her. “Oh, it’s super nice to have everyone here at once! And Emil too! What a nice family mood!”    
  
Onni shifted over. Tuuri explained to Emil that the lower bench existed for a reason, and that he didn’t actually have to leave. Grandma claimed that if this sauna was any colder, it would be actively knocking years off her life. It was indeed nice to have the entire family here, in the end, although Onni remained unconvinced by both Emil and the shashlik. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hockey is indeed much less of a big deal in Sweden than it is in Finland. Despite this, being regularly beaten by Sweden is a constant source of grief for Finnish hockey fans.


End file.
